Reminiscences of Three Years (1944-1947) spent in Urbana/ Champaign at the University of Illinois Chemistry Department

Robert R. Chambers
March 29, 2004

I was born in 1923 in Lincoln, Nebraska. My parents were Guy and Grace Chambers and I had one younger sister. I grew up in Lincoln and graduated from the University of Nebraska. My father was a prominent and respected lawyer in the town. My mother had been a librarian and piano teacher, before they married but as I knew her was a housewife in a good part of town who had a live-in maid to do all the cleaning and cooking. In my view the middle class wives of my parent's generation had a soft life compared to the generations before and after. My grandmother bore and raised 10 children and made ends meet financially in a frontier town - a tough life with lots of hard physical labor. My (second) wife had a full time professional job, senior vice president of Hill and Knowlton, one of the largest PR companies, and also did the cooking and laundry and raising of six kids. By comparison, the generation in between, that is, my mother and her friends, had relatively little useful to do or perhaps I should say the culture neither encouraged nor permitted them to do very much. My childhood was spent fighting with my mother who seemed determined to run my life. I successfully thwarted this ambition, and the techniques of resistance to being bossed I developed have lasted me the rest of my life, for better or worse.

At Nebraska, the Chemistry Department chairman was Cliff Hamilton, a real gentleman and good chemist. The program was set up so that a chemistry major was supposed to take a master's degree before moving on. Cliff offered me, in my senior year, the best scholarship he had to stay on the extra year, but I turned it down. Frustrated in romance, among other things I could not wait to get out of the town I grew up in.

I had a bad case of asthma as a child. I missed one third of my days in grade school, was never considered robust enough to take a course in gym in any school and flunked the advanced ROTC physical because I was 6' 3" but only weighed 117 pounds. So in 1944, graduating just before I turned 21, 1 was declared a 4F and Cliff got me into Illinois for graduate work.

Looking at the train schedules, the station master in Lincoln scheduled me to take the shortest route from Lincoln to Urbana going through Peoria. Getting to Peoria was simple, but then I had to wait a while at the station to take the next leg of the trip. I walked up the street to stretch my legs and fell in behind two fellows walking ahead of me who, I could hear, were discussing at length, the fine points of the law as applied to stabbing someone to death without being charged for murder. After a couple of blocks I quit following and beat it back to the station where I felt safer in the presence of other people.

The next leg was a small electrified railroad, really not much more than a trolley car, that ran east across Illinois. It did eventually get me to Urbana. But I never ran into anyone else who even knew that railroad existed, and I certainly never rode it again, given the good service from the Illinois Central.

I walked into the chemistry department, up to the counter. Mrs. Evans, the department secretary, came forth to meet me. I identified myself. She made it plain that she was not favorably impressed. She said she had felt sure I would be drafted and be unable to show up, but since I was here, she would put up with me. Clearly I got off on the wrong foot with Mrs. Evans, but I guess most other people in the department felt the same way about her.

At any rate, she gave me a suggestion for a rooming house, one right across the street, which was handy. There were five students on the second floor, and one vacancy when I arrived. The lady of the house, leading me up to see the room, turned, halfway up the stairs, and asked me if I was a Jew. I was baffled but said no, and asked why. She said she was very opposed to Jews and had always been proud of her ability to detect them. But the previous year she had rented one of the rooms to a redheaded boy and became very fond of him. Then several months later it turned out he was a Jew. It was too late for her to dislike him, and she resolved never to be put in that position again.

I had a roommate, Paul V. Smith (who later worked at Exxon). Paul, an affable chap, was a graduate student, who worked on Marvel's rubber research program. I learned that the graduate students who worked on that program either did monomer synthesis or polymerizations, one or the other. Paul was super efficient and carried out a full load of work of both kinds, doing about twice as much as anyone else. Then when he got back to the room at 4:30 pm he would sit right down and read the JACS. Personally, at that point in the day I was half dead and unable to read anything until I’d had dinner. After dinner I would study, but Paul had, on top of the work and journal reading, a full social calendar and would be out on a date nearly every night.

During that summer I joined Alpha Chi Sigma and when fall began went to live in the AXE house. This was wartime, and the department only had a few entering graduate students. At any rate the AXE house had plenty of space and I lived there the rest of my time at Urbana. The AXE house was just down the street from the residence of the Dean of Women. That meant the AXE house was located in a sorority district. I gather the house had been bought from a defunct sorority. The dean of women (we heard from girls who swore it was true) had instituted all sorts of remarkable rules. For example, coeds were forbidden to wear red on dates, too stimulating, or patent leather shoes, a boy might see a reflection up their skirts, or sit in a boy's lap unless there was a phone book between them. Sometime during the war it was decided by the dean that the usual dance hours would be reduced from requiring the dance to end by midnight, and all the girls to be back in the dorms and in their rooms at 1 a.m., to requiring that the dances end by eleven and the girls be in by midnight. There were impassioned protests and the dean finally accepted a compromise. The end of the dance was reduced to eleven, but the all-in-the dorm time was left at 1 pm. The students were gleeful at putting one over on the administration.

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